Jailbreak

Cydia

Macworld staffer Christopher Breen revealed yesterday that he had to jailbreak his iPad in order to project the screen display for the iPad Supersession he did with Ben Long at last week's Macworld. In a lengthy post, Breen provided detailed instructions for how to do a jailbreak - in a first for the mainstream Macworld.com - and highlighted Ryan Petrich's DisplayOut.

Breen had used an Elmo overhead projector last year to display the iPhone's screen at his Supersession at Macworld 2010. This was "which is less than ideal," Breen wrote in his explanation of why he chose to jailbreak the iPad this year, "because the image can be fuzzy." For the two hour Supersession focused on the iPad this year, Breen and Long wanted a better solution so that attendees could see the screen clearly. For that, he had to use Apple's $29 iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter, jailbreak, and download DisplayOut from Cydia. With the justification out of the way, Breen then goes on to publish over a thousand words detailing exactly how to do a tethered jailbreak of an iPad using redsn0w, search Cydia and download and install DisplayOut. He even points out that it's better to manually reboot your device instead of letting Cydia do it for you.

For Macworld - the original Mac magazine, which started a quarter-century ago and outlived or bought out most of its competitors - this is a significant change. The magazine and website regularly publish Apple-sourced FUD about jailbreaking, so it's a big deal for them to feature a JB tutorial in a post that concludes "we'll all celebrate the day when an untethered jailbreak is fully baked."